Shareholder Value Is No Longer Everything, Top C.E.O.s Say

Nearly 200 chief executives, including the leaders of Apple, Pepsi and Walmart, tried on Monday to redefine the role of business in society — and how companies are perceived by an increasingly skeptical public.

Breaking with decades of long-held corporate orthodoxy, the Business Roundtable issued a statement on “the purpose of a corporation,” arguing that companies should no longer advance only the interests of shareholders. Instead, the group said, they must also invest in their employees, protect the environment and deal fairly and ethically with their suppliers.

“While each of our individual companies serves its own corporate purpose, we share a fundamental commitment to all of our stakeholders,” the group, a lobbying organization that represents many of America’s largest companies, said in a statement. “We commit to deliver value to all of them, for the future success of our companies, our communities and our country.”

Today is only one day in all the days that will ever be. But what will happen in all the other days that ever come can depend on what you do today.
- ERNEST HEMINGWAY

There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things. For the reformer has enemies in all those who profit by the old order, and only lukewarm defenders in all those who would profit by the new order, this lukewarmness arising partly from fear of their adversaries … and partly from the incredulity of mankind, who do not truly believe in anything new until they have had actual experience of it.
- NICCOLO MACHIAVELLI

When you invent the ship, you also invent the shipwreck; when you invent the plane you also invent the plane crash; and when you invent electricity, you invent electrocution... Every technology carries its own negativity, which is invented at the same time as technical progress.
- PAUL VIRILIO

We are surrounded by the wondrous effects of machines and are encouraged to ignore the ideas embedded in them. Once a technology is admitted it plays out its hand; it does what it is designed to do. Our task is to understand what that design is—that is to say, when we admit a new technology to the culture, we must do so with our eyes wide open.
- NEIL POSTMAN, TECHNOPOLY

You're only given a little spark of madness. You mustn't lose it.
- ROBIN WILLIAMS

Creativity is relational. Its practice is most about casting widely and connecting disparate dots of existing knowledge in new, meaningful ways. To be creative, you’ve got to mine knowledge. You have to know your dots.
- BRUCE NUSSBAUM

It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is most adaptable to change.
- CHARLES DARWIN

Arguing that you don't care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don't care about free speech because you have nothing to say.
- EDWARD SNOWDEN

You invade my privacy, it’s nothing. I try to get it back, it’s a crime. You’ll never understand... it’s not that I have nothing to hide... I have nothing I want you to see.
- THE GIRL, ANON

Be a nuisance where it counts. Do your part to inform and stimulate the public to join your action. Be depressed, discouraged and disappointed at failure and the disheartening effects of ignorance, greed, corruption and bad politics... but never give up.
- MARJORIE STONEMAN DOUGLAS

First they ignore you. Then they ridicule you. Then they fight you. Then you win.
- MAHATMA GANDHI

The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any.
- ALICE WATERS

To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public.
- THEODORE ROOSEVELT